ELM Release-notes
Release 337 (February 12, 2018)
- New feature: Brand new effect engine to generate high quality and stunning visuals. 50 new effects available under the "Eye Candy" tab when browsing for effects.
- New feature: Audio reactive mix. Just flip a switch and ELM automatically mixes your media in sync with the music playing on your computer. Go in the live panel to see it.
- New feature: Allow changing the sACN priority which is useful to run a ELM backup computer to automatically take over in case of failure. Basically, you run two ELM computers with the same project file but one with the sACN priority to lower.
- New feature: Allow adding multiple effects at once in the media library. You can now use the standard list commands (ctrl+click, shift+click and ctrl+a) to select multiple effects in the effect selection dialog.
- New feature: Allow adding multiple videos and images starting at a specific media slot.
- New feature: Allow loading a new media file via the HTTP remote. It's handy for remote management of multiple ELM computers.
- Enhancement: Refreshed look with the new logo designed by Damon Nash.
- Enhancement: New color picker making it easier to select good looking colors.
- Enhancement: Smoother transitions when the speed is constantly changing (via remote or with the audio mix). Was a bit jumpy before.
- Enhancement: Double-clicking a media slot in the live panel now automatically executes the fade.
- Enhancement: Improve the stage's monitor fidelity.
- Enhancement: Save and restore the positions of the tool dialogs (color picker, effect configuration, etc) to avoid having to always move them out of the view.
- Fix: There was an error when canceling loading a project and the live view has been visible at least once.
Release 297 (15 Nov 2017)
- New feature: A project backup file is created every 5 minutes. To avoid slowdown during a live show, you need to manually save the project to trigger the backup creation. To open a backup, select the Backup file type in the file browser when opening a project. To set the backup to be the current project, simply save the project. This should bring peace of mind to many of us knowing we can always go back in time in case something is wrong with the latest project file.
- New feature: Allow to loop a specific video part for testing purpose.
When testing the content with a long video, you may want to test a specific part which may target a specific area in the real-world. You can set the start/stop in the video monitor and they'll be cleared when closing the monitor.
- New feature: Allow to offset and scale the stage's background image.
Was always centered, which isn't always what you want.
- Enhancement: New option to force sending sACN packets even when there's no change. An unreliable network may discard packets and this was causing old values to be visible for half a second (until the next idle packet was sent). There was already a way to do this with Art-Net by deactivating the "Optimize frames" option.
- Enhancement: Improve saving over the network. Since a network is really slower than a local disk, a progress dialog is now shown to make it clear what's going on.
- Fix: Prevent project file corruption when the save process is interrupted by some exceptional event. For example, when saving over the network, if the network becomes unavailable the project file will not be half written anymore.
- Fix: Avoid handling the mouse wheel event to change a numeric value when the number isn't currently selected. This was causing to mistakenly change a numeric value while scrolling.
- Fix: Was showing the wrong sACN universe when editing strips with a universe over 10000.
- Fix: Was decreasing the KiNET start universe each time the strips were edited.
Release 285 (Sep 20, 2017)
- New feature: Add a manage stages window. Click the "manage" button at the top-right in the stages tab. You can select multiple stages to resize or delete them all at once. It's also easier to reorder the stages to modify the merging order.
- New feature: Create stage(s) by projecting the selected strips in various ways. One strip per stage for easy targeting. All strips unrolled in straight lines one after another or one per row to ease the creation of video content to target each pixel. Select strips, right-click and select the "new stages from strips" menu.
- New feature: Additive licenses to allow users to easily buy more DMX universes. A user buys multiple licenses to get the universe count he needs and then imports all license files into ELM. For example, a user can buy 2 standard licenses of 16U each to get a total of 32U.
- New feature: OSC feedback. Send OSC back to the sender app to confirm ELM has received the message. Since OSC is based on UDP, packets may be lost without the sender knowing about it. So the feedback mechanism is used by some apps like TouchOSC to make sure everything is in sync.
- New feature: Add a intensityWhiteFade stage merge mode.
- Enhancement: Can activate the OSC and HTTP remotes at the same time as the DMX remote. DMX always takes precedence.
- Enhancement: Integrate the new NDI 3.0 library (less CPU and better image quality).
- Enhancement: Update the video codecs with fixes for H.264.
- Enhancement: Quick KiNet mapping - Automatically increment the first universe and add a shortcut key (alt-c) to configure the device.
- Enhancement: Better capture device error reporting and handling. Now automatically reconnect when a capture device like a USB camera has been accidentally unplugged.
Release 268 (July 31, 2017)
- New feature: Adjust the output intensity per strip to equalize the luminosity and compensate for power and manufacturing differences. Click the edit button for strips to see the new intensity button.
- New feature: Mini calculator added to most numeric boxes used to enter a size. Faster and less error prone than having to switch to the Windows calculator.
- New feature: Can now drag and drop items in the media library to quickly reorder.
- New feature: Specify the testing color intensity. It's way faster than having to adjust the RGB individually.
- New feature: Seek a video from the media monitor window. It's handy since we can see the monitor and seek while looking at the strips. The slider can also be larger (more precise) than in the media library.
- New feature: Buttons for black and white in the live panel. It was impossible to select the black color with the color wheel. This is a useful color to deactivate LEDs when testing since we can't always deactivate the stage.
- New feature: Configurable strip scale mode when resizing and duplicating a stage. Was always resizing uniformly but sometimes you resize to just add space and don't want any strip scaling.
- New feature: Go to selection (scroll to) menu item when right-clicking a strip in the list to make it easier to navigate in the strip editor when the stage is large. Double-clicking a strip in the list also scrolls it into view.
- New feature: Quick KiNet power supply configuration by specifying the IP address and number of ports only one time.
- New feature: Dialog to reorder strips when re-patching. Drag and drop strips to reorder or use the selection order.
- New feature: Fade the stage's intensity when switching the playlist.
Handy for architectural projects when adjusting the intensity for different hours of the day.
- New feature: Noise build-in effect added.
- Enhancement: More configuration options for the built-in effects.
- Enhancement: Enter the playlist intensity in percent with a numeric box for more precision than a slider.
- Enhancement: Now 3 decimals for the playlist speed for more precision.
Useful when you want an effect to last a very long time and need to set a very small speed.
- Enhancement: Stop color and intensity fades started by the scheduler when the values are changed remotely or via the live panel. With long fade times, we had to wait until the end before being able to set a value.
- Enhancement: Use ctrl+mouse wheel to zoom the stage.
Release 257 (May 25, 2017)
- New feature: Allow configuring the built-in effects. You can now change a few parameters to better fit your installation. New shortcut:
right-click on a media in the live window to configure it.
- New feature: Show a tooltip with the LED number and its DMX address when the mouse is over a LED to help troubleshooting.
- New feature: Locate (highlight) individual LEDs in the real world. Go in the testing tab and click the Locate button. You can go through the list of all LEDs or put your mouse over a LED in the editor.
- New feature: Detect overlapping DMX addresses. Go in the testing tab and click the Conflicts button.
- New feature: Consolidate the media library to make it easy to move a project to another computer. See the new consolidate button in the media menu.
- New feature: Support animated GIF files.
- New feature: Allow scheduling playlists relatively to the sunrise and sunset times. This is handy for architectural installations.
- Enhancement: Improve many parts of the scheduler window to make it easier to understand.
- Enhancement: Reduce the app start-up time (from 4 seconds to 2 seconds).
- Enhancement: Reduce video capture and playback latency by about 5-20 ms depending on the video resolution.
- Enhancement: Show progress when loading a stage based on the number of loaded strips. Wasn't showing any progress before.
- Enhancement: Go directly in the settings tab when loading a project.
Was briefly showing other tabs, which was confusing since the user didn't know what was going on.
- Fix: Prevent showing multiple confirmation messages at the same time.
Was able to press alt-F4 multiple times to close the app or press ctrl-O to open a project while the confirmation message was visible.
- Fix: Wrongly setting the project has been modified flag when the stages were locked and loading a project without the lock while viewing another tab than the project settings and then going in the project settings.
- Fix: Intermittent error when loading a project with a different first sACN universe setting.
- Fix: Wrong LED position when moving a control point to the far right with a stage's width of 985 and being zoomed in. There was a rounding problem putting the LED outside the stage.
- Fix: Wasn't able to move control points if the computer wasn't rebooted for more than 25 days. This was a problem with the elapsed time being in 32 bits.
Release 235 (April 20, 2017)
- New feature: 1024 universes for Art-Net and sACN (up from 512). Can send all universes over the same network adapter when using a good 1 Gigabit network switch.
- New feature: 5 new effects in the media library: rain, bouncing squares, happy rainbow, old snake and fireworks.
- New feature: Replace the RGB sliders in the live panel by a color wheel to quickly select a color.
- New feature: Add a grayscale option to the video transcoder to easily create black and white videos.
- New feature: RGBWmax LED type to activate the RGB+white LEDs when a white color is needed and get the maximum brightness.
- Enhancement: Improve the stage's monitor quality. LEDs are now brighter.
- Enhancement: Nicer horizontal and vertical swing effects by adding a trail.
- Enhancement: Use less CPU to display the media preview in the live panel.
- Enhancement: Update the video codecs (LAVFilters 0.69).
- Enhancement: Update to Spout 2.006.
- Enhancement: Update to NDI 2.1.0.3.
- Enhancement: Update to .Net framework 4.6.
- Enhancement: Many performance optimizations to handle thousands of LED strips in the editor.
- Fix: In the stage's monitor, LEDs around the border were brighter than the others.
- Fix: Wasn't merging strips properly when some strips were bundled and some weren't.
- Fix: Cancel app exit if user cancels saving the project.
- Fix: Properly clear all remote overrides when disabling the remote control.
Release 221 (January 25, 2017)
New feature: Play the audio if a video file contains an audio track. Go in the media tab and activate the play audio option. It's handy to create music and light shows since you don't need to play the music with another software anymore and keep it in sync with ELM.
New feature: Allow preserving the audio track when doing a video transcoding.
New feature: Remote control via HTTP. This is a protocol based on TCP/IP, which makes it the perfect way to integrate with architectural control systems like Crestron and Pharos. You can also create custom web interfaces.
New feature: Allow serving static files with the web server. It's handy to serve a little web app to remotely control ELM via HTTP.
New feature: Allow setting a different network adapter for Art-Net input and output.
Enhancement: More options in the testing mode - color scroll and fade in/out animations, auto move rectangle horizontally and vertically.
Enhancement: When controlling the stage intensity and color from OSC, the scheduler will not override these parameters until it is reactivated.
Enhancement: Add /r /g and /b OSC addresses to make it possible to use TouchOSC to control the RGB. TouchOSC can't send triplets.
Enhancement: Double-clicking the zoom and live sliders (activation,RGB...) resets the slider to a default value.
Enhancement: Update to NDI version 2.0.
Fix: Wrong addressing when using the Enttec USB Pro for remote control.
Release 202 (November 7, 2016)
New feature: Add a shortcut to reset control points (delete all except the first and last points). Handy when duplicating a strip but you want to create a new shape. Right-click on the first control point (the green
one) to see the option.
Enhancement: Optionally duplicate schedules when duplicating a stage.
Often, you don't want to use the same schedules and it was tedious to delete all playlists.
Enhancement: Allow to set the stage merge mode when duplicating a stage.
Enhancement: Better instructions when duplicating a stage. Was displaying the same instructions as when creating a new stage.
Enhancement: Allow to use Art-Net universe from 0 to 511 for input. Was limited to 0-255.
Enhancement: Set a maximum opacity of 90% to the stage's design image to avoid hiding everything under it.
Enhancement: Hide the video transcode button when the video file is not found. The transcode will fail anyway, so no need to show it and confuse the user.
Enhancement: Add an option to keep the aspect ratio when resizing a stage.
Fix: Wasn't able to put all control points of a curve at the exact same position. Handy when creating a top view of the strips for 3D effects.
Fix: Prevent resizing a stage to 1x1 since all strip positioning is lost . Now the minimum is 5x5.
Fix: Wasn't properly handling the case of bundling strips that had a 1x1 size.
Fix: Wasn't saving an effect in the media library after clicking the configure button.
Fix: Wasn't merging stages in testing mode when the stage's activation was at 0. Now force a 100% activation for the merge when in testing mode.
Fix: Avoid telling we're subscribed to receive a Art-Net universe when the Art-Net input isn't active.
Release 200 (16 Oct 2016)
New feature: KiNet v2 output. Up to 512 Color Kinetics power supplies can be configured. That means ELM can talk directly to Philips Color Kinetics fixtures, which are often used in buildings. So now, ELM can output Art-Net, sAcn and KiNet, all at the same time.
New feature: sACN E1.31 universe sync. A synchronization frame is automatically sent, following the upcoming sACN standard recommendation.
New feature: OSC remote control.
New feature: RGBA in 16 bit.
New feature: Quick move and resize controls.
Enhancement: Hexadecimal indicator next to the universe box to avoid confusion. It wasn't obvious if the Art-Net universe display mode was in decimal or hexadecimal, leading to errors.
Enhancement: Update NDI to the July version.
Enhancement: Update Spout to the August version.
Fix: Wrong calculation of the net&subnet for ArtNet3 poll replies for universes above 256.
Release 189 (July 15, 2016)
New feature: Playlist start and end dates. This allows scheduling a playlist for a specific date or period of the year. This is important for permanent installations.
New feature: Playlist duration. It's now easier to stop a playlist after a specific duration and this removes the need to start an empty playlist to do so.
Enhancement: Execute transitions properly when stopping a playlist and starting another.
Enhancement: Automatically resize the live sliders to fit smaller screens.
Enhancement: Improve the help instructions when no ArtNet nodes are detected.
Enhancement: Allow to click the configure button for live video inputs even when the capture isn't started. If the input device doesn't support configuration, the button is now hidden instead of doing nothing.
Enhancement: Various usability improvements.
Fix: Properly handle network adapter configuration changes by waiting until the changes are effective before re-opening the adapter.
Fix: Wrong text colors when using a dark Windows theme. Now the texts are white as expected.
Release 180 (June 22, 2016)
New feature: Increase the maximum number of DMX universes from 512 to 1024 (now 512 ArtNet + 512 sAcn).
The main benefit is to avoid mixing ArtNet and sAcn when more than 256 universes are needed, which makes patching easier.
New feature: Allow to bundle multiple strips together to create a single entity. Select multiple strips and right-click on a strip in the strip list to see the bundle option.
New feature: 40+ transition effects. Can be selected in playlists and via the remote control to do transitions but also to apply effects at any time.
New feature: Extended DMX remote control mode. 16 bit dimmer, individually control the media and speed of the A and B sides, select a mix/transition effect.
New feature: 16 bit color depth support. New fixture types added: White16, RGB16 and RGBW16. The higher precision is used when fading and mixing media.
New feature: Option to optimize ArtNet frames by sending only the channels and universes that have changed.
New feature: Option to send ArtSync frames, which is the way to sync the outputs of many nodes.
New feature: Button added to the scan nodes dialog to automatically assign IP addresses to ArtNet universes (activate unicast).
Enhancement: Properly handle poll replies from the Pixelator by using the bind index to differenciate the multiple virtual nodes.
Enhancement: Clean the DMX buffers when removing fixtures or reconfiguring the DMX addresses. This avoids leaving old values in the buffers and it eases troubleshooting the patch.
Enhancement: Add video and image file filters when browsing for files in the media library.
Enhancement: Support tiff and gif (not animated) images.
Enhancement: Update NDI to the latest version (May 11, 2016)
Enhancement: Reduce the delay when starting to play a video (about 30ms less).
Enhancement: Reduce the delay when switching between media of different sizes.
Enhancement: Avoid overloading the computer when generating many video thumbnails by limiting the number of processes.
Enhancement: Allow to switch the ArtNet universe display between hexadecimal and decimal.
Enhancement: Many performance and usability improvements.
Release 145 (May 10, 2016)
New feature: Integration of the Network Device Interface (NDI) by NewTek. It allows receiving live video streams over the network. Full HD and even 4K videos are supported. More details at: http://www.newtek.com/ndi.html.
New feature: Snap to grid. A grid can now be displayed to help positioning control points and strips. Go in the Stage tab to see the grid options and press Ctrl-G to toggle the grid.
New feature: Show the 16 array patch modes in the add strips dialog. Before, you needed to use the flip x and y options after patching.
New feature: Option to automatically run ELM at Windows start-up and load the last project file. This is handy in case of computer reboot.
New feature: Option to lock the stages to avoid accidental modifications.
New feature: Save the live panel state in the project file and restore on load.
New feature: Non-looping playlists. Looping is now an option, which makes it easier to schedule one-time events.
New feature: Color crossfade between playlist items, using the color filters and the transition duration.
New feature: Option to show a range circle around the first control point to easily position other points at equal distance (and make same length strips). Right-click on any first control point (the green ones) to see the option.
Enhancement: Display the ArtNet universes in hexadecimal in order to easily see the subnet.
Enhancement: Display the playlist total duration.
Enhancement: Update to use Spout 2.005 - lower latency, better video card support.
Enhancement: DVI window now has a title bar making it easier to move it around while not maximized.
Fix: Was wrongly resetting remote universe when switching from ArtNet to sAcn and universe was 0.
Fix: Save the sAcn first output universe in the project file.
Fix: Wasn't always asking to save the project before quitting even though the project has been modified.
Release 126 (17 March 2016)
New feature: Added support for RGBA, RGBAW/RGBWA LED type.
New feature: Allow to quickly move strips by right-clicking on them and dragging.
New feature: Button added in the schedule panel to stop the scheduler and clear all playing media.
New feature: Copy/paste playlists and individual items. Even work across stages.
New feature: Allow to adjust the contrast and brightness in the video transcoder window.
New feature: New keyboard shortcut to zoom to fit a stage: ctrl-0
New feature: New keyboard shortcut to deselect all strips: ctrl-D
New feature: Allow to break universe each N strips when patching.
New feature: Allow to specify a rotation center offset when duplicating strips.
Enhancement: Update the video transcoder to support the latest video compressions like H265.
Enhancement: Performance optimization for video capture card, reducing latency and CPU usage.
Enhancement: Remove lags when selecting many strips using the selection rectangle.
Enhancement: Reduce the memory usage of the media monitor window.
Enhancement: Better handling of the special case of a strip with only one LED (a simple PAR). Display a circle instead of a strip, which is easier to manipulate.
Release 107 (12 Feb 2016)
- New feature: Add support for DMX input via the Enttec USB Pro.
- New feature: Allow to flip horizontally and vertically live
video inputs. Handy with some video cards sending the video flipped.
- New feature: Allow to insert, remove and offset items in the
media library.
- New feature: Align control points on a straight line by holding
the shift key while dragging.
- Enhancement: Better video preview performances (less little
stops and lag).
- Enhancement: Load the stage’s design image faster and use less
memory in case of a high def image.
- Enhancement: Improve stability when using a slow network (wifi
particularly) by dropping packets instead of accumulating too much delay.
- Enhancement: Improve the control point visual design to make it
smaller and avoid hiding too much other objects.
- Enhancement: Show a live preview of the bounding rectangle
while in the offset/resize strips dialog.
- Enhancement: Allow selecting outside the stage using the
rectangle. Make it easier selecting strips close to the border.
- Enhancement: Maximum output rate increased from 50 to 60.
Release 92 (7 Jan 2016)
- Support for ENTTEC's RGBW LED tape
- A few cosmetic improvements
- Performance optimization and clean-up
Release 87 (25 Nov 2015)
- New Feature: multiple merge modes for the stages
- Bug Fixes